Gerald Matticks was considered “the door” to the Port of Montreal.
In 1995, he had beaten the system when charges that he was involved in one of the largest seizures of hashish ever in Quebec, were stayed. Matticks and his brother Richard as well as five other men, were arrested in connection with 26.5 tons of hashish that had been seized in containers at the Port of Montreal. But according to investigators, a shipping document collected during the Sûreté du Québec investigation had gone missing, and it was replaced by a copy faxed by Customs Canada to the Sûreté du Québec's offices. A judge determined that what the Sûreté had done was the equivalent of planting evidence. The question remained â had the bill of lading ever actually been seized? The charges were stayed, causing a genuine scandal. “L'Affaire Matticks” became a household phrase in Montreal and leant the West End Gang notoriety. The scandal also opened the door to a probe of the Sûreté du Québec and how it had managed its criminal investigations during the 1990s. The probe was headed by Lawrence Poitras, a former chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court. When the Poitras Commission ended two years after it began, the 1,700-page report depicted the Sûreté du Québec as a backward police force that routinely broke the law during its investigations. The report contained the blunt statement: “A crisis of values has shaken the Sûreté du Québec from the beginning of this decade.”
Sidestepping the charges he faced over the hashish seizure merely added to the lore surrounding Gerry Matticks, the youngest of 14 children who emerged from the poverty of
Montreal's Goose Village and, for appearance's sake, lived the life of a gentleman farmer on the South Shore. In 1971, Matticks, along with some of his siblings, had been charged with attempted murder, but they managed to beat the case. In 1977, the police searched his home in St-Hubert and found a small stash of stolen jewelry including 28 women's gold rings and three pairs of earrings. All told, the jewelry was worth nearly $5,000, and it had been stolen from a store during an armed robbery on Montreal's Chabanel Street. But again, Matticks managed to get an acquittal.
One of the few times Matticks was ever sentenced to jail time came in 1990, when he was caught as part of a ring that stole trucks, repainted them and resold them. The police monitored members of the ring while they stole the trucks using a tow truck licensed to Matticks. He served only 24 weekends as his punishment. But a different image of Matticks emerged after his Project Ocean case was brought to court, and he would eventually be sentenced to 12 years in prison.
During Matticks' bail hearing, a parade of honest citizens, including a priest, testified that he was a generous man who deserved some leniency. “Did he come to church every Sunday? No. Did he help out people? Yes. Did he practice his faith? Yes,” said Father Marc Mignault. Mignault, the parish priest of a church in Saint-Bruno, testified at Matticks' bail hearing on July 3, 2001. Mignault said that while Matticks certainly was not a churchgoer, he was a decent man with a charitable heart. The priest said he had come to know Matticks from conversations they would have at a restaurant the West End gang member owned.
Mignault said Matticks donated frozen turkeys for Christmas baskets, and once gave enough turkeys to fill an 18-foot freezer. Matticks also donated toys to the church, and, through a trucking company he owned, he would supply cases of food that had been claimed as damaged in insurance claims. Mignault said that when the presbytery roof was leaking, the church had hired four
different roofers to fix the complicated problem without any success. “One day when talking to Gerry, he said, 'I'll send someone over. I had a similar problem at home. This guy is excellent. He'll fix it.' He came over. He fixed it. I asked [Gerry] for the bill three times and he said it was lost in the mail.”
Even before Mignault testified, others had told Judge Gilbert Morier that Matticks was an honorable businessman and the equivalent of Santa Claus. Max Freid, a 61-year-old livestock broker from Côte St-Luc, an affluent Montreal suburb, said he had known Matticks for 20 years. They had done business together through a company Matticks owned called G.M. Livestock, and he considered him a friend. Freid dealt in up to $25 million a year in cattle. “I know Mr. Matticks but I don't know what the case is about,” Freid said, adding that, despite this, he was willing to make a $50,000 deposit to secure Matticks' bail. “To me, I always did business with him and he was honorable.” Testifying after Freid was Jean Lepine, a 63-year-old plumber from Greenfield Park who immersed himself in charitable work.
“I call him my Santa Claus,” Lepine said of Matticks whom he had known for 20 years. “I knew Mr. Matticks for the good things he has done. I am someone who has done charity work for 30 years. I am surrounded by people like Mr. Matticks and when I need donations, Mr. Matticks is very accessible.” Lepine told the story of a Christmas float that Matticks had arranged for a Christmas parade for 15 years. The float was very generous with gifts to children. Matticks would ride on the 45-foot float, accompanied by Santa Claus, distributing gifts and ornaments to poor children.
Lepine had also told of how, during the January 1998 ice storm that damaged Quebec's hydro system so badly thousands of homes went without electricity for weeks, Matticks opened his restaurant and helped out by offering 2,200 free meals to people. During that trying time for many, especially on the South Shore,
Matticks had given out free wood to families, Lepine said, pounding his hand on the witness stand to emphasize his point. “He was very flexible. He did not consider the cost,” Lepine said. Matticks' lawyer also produced an affidavit from Steven Olynyk, the former mayor of Greenfield Park and a retired police officer. It described how, on one Christmas, Matticks had donated 100 food baskets to the poor.
But from that bail hearing, another image of Matticks emerged, one that came from the police who saw how Matticks had made the fortune that allowed him to be so generous. Some of the most important members of the Hells Angels were going out of their way to meet with Matticks while they were under investigation in Project Rush. Investigators in the Sûreté du Québec were elated when they learned Maurice (Mom) Boucher and other members of the Nomads chapter had started showing up at Matticks' butcher shop and meat warehouse in St-Hubert.
One of the first meetings between Mom and Matticks was on May 25,1999. The police were tailing Boucher and his chauffeur Guy Lepage, a former police officer who left the Montreal Urban Community Police in shame and later joined the Rockers. The two ended up at Viandes 3-1. It was a building Matticks co-owned with one of his sons. On the outside of the building was a large shamrock, proof that Matticks was proud of his Irish heritage. A plainclothes cop followed Lepage and Boucher inside, posing as a customer, and noticed they were not at the service counter. But he did notice a stairway that led to an office. Lepage and Boucher spent about 30 minutes in the office. On December 2,1999, Lepage and Boucher returned to Viandes 3-1 and again stayed for about 30 minutes.
Months later, it appeared that Boucher had delegated the Hells Angels' meetings with Matticks to other members of his gang. At the time, the Quebec Court of Appeal was considering the possibility of a new trial for the murders of two prison
guards, which meant Boucher would certainly be held in custody until he was brought before a jury again. One of the first indications that other Hells Angels had taken over for Boucher's dealings with Matticks came from police informant Dany Kane. He told his controllers that in May 2000, a meeting had been held between Michel Rose, Normand Robitaille, André Chouinard and Guillaume Serra at an exotic restaurant in Boucherville. Kane said he stood watch at the restaurant along with Dany St-Pierre. After the meeting the Hells Angels went to Matticks' butcher shop. Boucher was not there, and six months later, in October, he was arrested for the new trial.
By December 7, 2000, investigators had grown very interested in Matticks and his dealings with the Hells Angels. They followed a car he was in to an Italian restaurant on Taschereau Blvd. in La Prairie. Matticks and Louis Elias Lekkas, a man the police knew very little about, were seen going into the restaurant together. Minutes later, a Jeep Cherokee driven by Kenny Bedard, a member of the Rockers, pulled up to the restaurant. Normand Robitaille, who was by then a full-patch member of the Nomads chapter, climbed out of the Jeep carrying a briefcase. He walked into the restaurant and sat down with Lekkas and Matticks. After the meeting, Lekkas and Matticks drove back to Matticks' butcher shop.
On January 10, 2001, the police were tailing Lekkas as he left Viandes 3-1 in a
BMW
and headed to a pizza restaurant in St-Hubert where he grabbed a table. Again, Kenny Bedard and Normand Robitaille showed up minutes later in a Ford Expedition. After the meeting, Lekkas went back to the butcher shop where he met with Matticks. On January 11, 2001, Lekkas went to the same restaurant to meet with Robitaille and Marc-André Hotte, an important member of the Hells Angels' Trois Rivières chapter and the godfather of their puppet gang, the Jokers.
The police eventually established that Matticks and Lekkas were friends as well as business partners.
“On several occasions they worked in the same location, almost every day at Viandes 3-1,” said Michel Girard, a Sûreté du Québec organized crime investigator, during a bail hearing. “They would go to get haircuts together. They'd go to sex boutiques together, do errands together, go to the casino. They were like two good friends.”
Girard had been called as a reinforcement to help in Project Ocean as the police tried to determine who were the mysterious figures behind the coded entries that camouflaged who was supplying the Hells Angels' drug network in such large quantities. Girard's task was to find out whose names belonged to the codes “Beef” and “Beef 2” on the Nomads chapter's accounting ledger. As they began seeing Lekkas leave the Nomads Bank with huge sums of money, they would soon learn the codes were for Matticks and Lekkas.
Lekkas had been working at Viandes 3-1 since 1995.On October 10, 2000, before they knew who Matticks was, the police tailed Lekkas as he drove away from one of the Nomads Bank apartment buildings with Donald Driver, a man who had long-established ties to the Matticks brothers. Lekkas picked up two large cardboard boxes full of money and headed to the Longueuil courthouse where he was facing a possible trial for stealing a truckload of chicken breasts. The pair went to the small, dingy snack bar inside the courthouse. Lekkas and Driver left the courthouse around 4:30 p.m. and headed for Viandes 3-1, presumably with the money. After a while, a man Girard described as elderly walked out of the butcher's shop. He headed for a Chevrolet and Lekkas accompanied him. The man got into the car, which was registered in Matticks' name. On that day, the surveillance team was not able to identify Matticks. But now the police realized there was a chance that the smuggler who had escaped prosecution in their most embarrassing moment was involved in drug deals with the Nomads chapter. The police followed the car as it
traveled to a farm in La Prairie, another town in the South Shore. The police were already familiar with the farm, as Matticks had lived there for a while with a woman named Katherine Harris and his 12-year-old son. The farmhouse on the land was far off the access road. The police also noticed Matticks had installed surveillance cameras everywhere.
On November 16,2000, the police followed Lekkas again after he left one of the Montreal apartment buildings used for the Nomads Bank. He was carrying a grey Brooks sports bag with him, which he placed in the trunk of his
BMW
. Just moments before, Sûreté investigator Pierre Boucher had sneaked briefly into the apartment to try to determine who it was for. He spotted a note in the grey bag that read, “For Young Italian $500,000, Beef.” Lekkas was handed the bag by Robert Gauthier, the man running the day-to-day operations of the Nomads Bank. Lekkas drove to Matticks' farm in La Prairie. Matticks' black Chevrolet was there, too. After leaving the farm, Lekkas headed for a house in Carignan. It was owned by Matticks and, he would later tell the police, it was where his mistress, Cindy Wade, lived.
On December 12,2000, the police watched as Lekkas again left one of the apartments. They tried to follow him but there was a severe blizzard that day and he disappeared into the snowstorm. But by then the police had a good idea of what was going on. Lekkas would often be seen using a pizza restaurant in St-Hubert for his meetings. It was close to Viandes 3-1 and close to a bar named Miss St-Hubert which the police believed was run by some of Matticks' associates and his son Donald.
“Through wiretaps we heard several conversations that showed that Mr. Matticks has a control over things like repairs at Miss St-Hubert,” Girard said during the bail hearing.
On paper, Donald Matticks seemed to be a mere employee of the bar. In tax declarations, he claimed to have worked there between 1994 and 1999, making a mere $14,000 annually. Girard
said the building that housed Viandes 3-1 was owned by Gerald Matticks and Donald Matticks through a numbered company. Through wiretaps, the police learned that Gerald Matticks ran and controlled Viandes 3-1. The police overheard him complaining about an order of chickens. They also overheard him authorizing orders for a children's party. But the clincher was when they overheard Katherine Harris call and ask for “Gerry.” She was passed on to the wrong person and to make herself clear she said that she wanted to speak to “the president.” It would become significant information when one of Matticks' lawyers would later claim he was just an employee there.
Other evidence came up suggesting that Matticks had his drug money tied up in other legitimate businesses. When the police raided Matticks' office on March 28, 2001, they found a lease signed by Matticks and Lekkas for a tanning salon on Grande Allée in St-Hubert. They also found a security video monitor that had four screens in one showing what was going on in each room in Viandes 3-1. In his office, Matticks kept police scanners and a list of all the principal channels of the municipal police forces in the area. The scanners were the same ones the police had seized from him in 1994, after the large hashish seizure. They were returned to Matticks after the case was tossed out of court â they even still had the Sûreté's old evidence tags on them. There were also two money-counting machines. Inside a refrigerator the police found a small piece of paper. On it were the words “Guy” and “Mom” with two phone numbers. One was the cell number of Guy Lepage, Mom Boucher's chauffeur; the other number was for a pager in Guy Lepage's name. The police also found an electronic scale that could weigh up to 1,200 grams, and they found about six grams of hashish in one of Matticks' desks.